On a low hummock in the gently rolling pastureland of Fahy in County Galway, a gravel pit that once warranted marking on Ordnance Survey maps had, by 1984, left no visible trace whatsoever on the surface of the land.

The feature appeared as a hachured symbol, the cartographic shorthand used to indicate a hollow or excavated depression, on the 1944 to 1945 revision of the OS 6-inch map. The larger-scale OS 25-inch plan named it more plainly as a disused gravel pit. Gravel extraction of this kind was commonplace in post-medieval rural Ireland, providing material for local road-making and farm use, and such pits were often modest, short-lived affairs that the land quietly absorbed once working stopped. When the site was inspected in 1984, the hummock remained but the pit itself had vanished, leaving only its cartographic ghost behind. Because the feature dated to after AD 1700, it fell outside the scope of formal archaeological classification, which generally concerns itself with earlier remains. The result is a site that exists most fully on paper, caught between the two maps that bracket its memory.